Any unemployed pop living under Social Welfare living standards generates Unity. Any unemployed pop under Utopian Abundance living standards generates not only Unity, but Research, but will hold whatever job they qualify for. The actual reasons are surprisingly simple:
While most people don't like work, most people want to feel like they achieved something. Thus, even if their needs are covered, the dread of being useless is worse than most work, so pops will try to look for work.
Even when unable to find work, unemployed pops are not reduced to begging and other degrading acts, and will try their best to stay active, which would usually involve trying their best to create art such as songs, awesome 3D animations, or what have you. Culture in general (of which art is a big part) is what Unity represents, and on the scale of billions of people like Pops are, some unemployed people will produce great works of art.
Unity also vaguely represents "you've achieved your goals as a nation" in the form of a resource - Rogue Servitors get it for taking care of their bio-trophies, Fanatic Purifiers get it for purging aliens, and so on. An Egalitarian or Fanatic Egalitarian civilization would believe that the purpose of a society is to take care of the people in it, so of course unemployed people being supported by the government would generate Unity.
Research from unemployed people is also simple to explain. Unemployed pops are showered with Consumer Goods which are an abstraction for all civilian products that fill "wants" rather than "needs". Scientists today are already making quite good research video games, that uses players to somewhat "automate" a lot of calculations. Presumably unemployed pops living under Utopian Abundance living standards are using similar software to help researchers all around the galaxy, all the while having fun.
Alternatively, unemployed pops have more free time when their needs are being looked after, and they use this free time to pursue personal projects and research outside of normal academic channels.
The Vultaum plan was doomed from the start. Every Stellaris player knows that you need more, not less Pops to create such lag as to make the game unplayable.
The Flavor Text of every technology, building, Galactic Community resolution, policy, and so on is always a perfect match to one of the following:
One of the Ethics, either regular or Fanatic variant
The five pacts you can form with powerful Shroud beings represent the most destructive traits of the Zroni leadership, and in a way reflect the rise and fall of the Zroni Empire.
The Whisperers in the Void reflect the Zroni desire for knowledge, which while not evil unto itself pushed them to make dangerous choices and decisions that would spell the downfall of themselves, their empire, and the whole galaxy. Accepting this covenant gives you more knowledge, but often causes your leaders to turn to drugs or commit suicide as they learn horrible truths and experience terrible visions and prophecies of their eventual fall.
The Instrument of Desire represents the Zroni desire to ascend and become greater, their constant seeking of more, the embodiment of their greed and lust. Sure enough, it gives you more, but your people are harder to control and more likely to rebel, just like most of the Zroni eventually did.
The Composer of Strands represents the great plans and designs the Divine Zroni had for the rest of the galaxy, a reflection of their pride and arrogance even in light of the rest of their peoples' revulsion. It gives you more population, but randomly tinkers with them, playing God with your member races as the Zroni leaders once did.
The Eater of Worlds represents the indifference of the Zroni leadership to the destruction they caused in their pursuit of power, and on a larger level is a manifestation of their civilization-ending civil war. Appropriately, you gain combat bonuses but your people randomly die, and there's a low chance an entire world will get pulled into the Shroud.
Finally, the End of the Cycle represents the insanity of the Divine Zroni and the destruction of their civilization. You have to be crazy to accept their too-good-to-be-true pact, but the benefits are unfathomably huge, granting you the single most powerful boon in the entire game for an extremely long time. Better win before it expires though, or you too will go out in a blaze of glory... and take the rest of the galaxy with you.
One would expect a spiritualist empire, especially one that are fanatically so, to have a penalty toward research as similar civilizations would in other games. However, such an empire not only making its way to the spacefaring age but surviving would obviously need to push enough funding into the sciences in order to stay in step with other empires even if it considers its beliefs to be more important, much like a pacifist civilization would still understand the need for a military. Also, much like religions in real life, adherents don't necessarily have a dim view of science, with some even becoming scientists themselves; science is typically seen as a way of understanding the universe they considered to be God's creation.
Materialists don't get threatened by a player Crisis Faction, not the same way every other faction does. If you think about it, though, of course they wouldn't. Given the nature of what becoming the Crisis Faction entails and the kinds of beliefs a faction would need to have to attempt it, Materialism is the ethic it maps most closely to. The Crisis Faction is going to share at least enough common ground with them to refrain from saying 'We're going to kill you all' in favor of something more akin to 'Watchthis.'
One would expect the menacing corvettes, destroyers, and cruisers to actually look more imposing than a collection of metal and asteroids fused together given that the shift to using minerals as opposed to alloys would make them cheaper to build in larger numbers. However, this makes sense from a strategic standpoint. Since they started going down the path of becoming the crisis, your empire knew the galaxy wasn't just going to lie down and let you destroy them. They anticipated the likelihood of fighting a multi-front war against the likes of awakened empires, federations, and even the Galactic Community itself that will not end until one side falls and where failure means the complete subjugation of your empire at best or the extermination of your species at worse. Therefore, instead of wasting valuable resources and time building foundries and Forge Planets, your empire decides to simply capture the plentiful asteroids and covert then into ships. That way, they can produce enough ships quickly enough to at least buy time and distract enemies away from your precious Aetherophasic Engine and Star Eaters. Sure your ships may have weaker hulls than those of the enemy but you can replace your losses faster than they can and every fleet being rebuilt is a fleet not being used to stop you...
Function over style is a thing for another reason: your empire is planning to enter the Shroud and become gods anyway; why should you worry about how disposable assets look especially when your ascension destroys everything including your own megastructure?
The culmination of the Become the Crisis ascension perk is the Aetherophasic Engine megastructure. Its purpose is simple and stark; to destroy the galaxy so that your species may ascend into the Shroud as gods. It is fitting that this device, and others like it, are implicated in the creation of the other Endgame Crisis factions. The Contingency outright states that the Aetherophasic Engine is the very "class 30 singularity" that they were originally created to prevent. The Prethoryn Scourge is implied to be running from a galaxy where one is being used. Finally the Extradimensional Invaders, which come from different and mutually hostile factions, may very well be what happens which a civilization succeeds at using one.
A minor one: the Toxoid Advisor is, among all advisors, the most abrasive, verbally downplaying your every move, speaking in a morose tone and showing glee only when things turn sour for your empire. It makes complete sense when you remember that it's the *Toxoid* advisor: of course it's negative towards your accomplishments, it's *being toxic*.
The game starts out with all of the alien empires reaching FTL at around the same time, and within two centuries the entire galaxy is claimed by the various empires. With such rapid advancement, one has to wonder how the galaxy could have been so empty to begin with. The only clues we have to go on are the anomalies scattered throughout the various systems, and the Fallen Empires who don't really have anything to say to you or the other "younger" races. From this we can gather that the galaxy apparently was filled with sapient life millions of years ago, and that they all just ... disappeared at some point, leaving you and the others to inherit their former empires. The question is, what could have triggered this mass extinction and driven the Fallen Empires into isolation without leaving so much as ashredof evidence behind? Even the endgame crises aren't that thorough.
The event in which stray mass driver rounds from another galaxy randomly strike your science vessel makes this even scarier. Those rounds crossed the intergalactic void at slower-than-light speeds, which means whoever fired them was at a similar level of technology to your own empire millions of years ago. What happened to those guys? Who were they fighting?
The Precursor chains mostly do end up explaining why those precursors aren't around any more. Where that shifts back towards this is that several of them reveal the existence of other civilizations around at that time... whose only identifiable remnants are the indirect evidence from the Precursor-chain civilizations, giving the impression that something has periodically been wrecking active civilizations very thoroughly while leaving the remnants of already destroyed civilizations untouched.
The Curator enclaves say they were created by the ascendant powers of the time to safeguard against another dark age of mass extinctions and barbarism — and they failed. Perhaps the fallen empires went the way of the Cybrex, but pulled out before it was too late.
Amusingly enough the Cybrex turned out to just be hiding.
One possible thing to find is an asteroid belt that used to be a planet. The population decided to destroy it for unknown reasons.
The Utopia DLC is adding an "Ascension" mechanic whereby an empire eventually uploads themselves into robots, masters their own biology, or contact a higher plane. It could be that after those "ascended" empires take care of potential threats to themselves they retreat into Cyberspace, engineer themselves into living ecosystems, or Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
By that stroke of logic, the Extradimensional Invaders could easily be the result of an empire leaving this mortal coil.
Or perhaps The Loop ended them, and is eternally allowing empires to build and expand before tearing them down. What will be was, what was will be — the ascendancy of one empire happened before, and may very well continue... forever. It doesn't help that one of the quest chain communications reveals the Worm to be a Dimensional Horror, which should tell you that you really shouldn't mess with that thing.
Yet another suggestion, as of Utopia, is that the End of the Cycle took them, as befits its name.
Of course, consider all of the above possibilities are in the game, and the way the galaxy is absolutely littered with ruins, archaeological sites, alien corpses, mysterious ancient edifices and entities and Fallen Empires and so forth, it seems entirely possible that the galaxy filling up with life only for it to all collapse and start over might have happened more than once, for multiple causes.
Eventually, you can unlock the ability to genetically engineer your populace in order to revise their traits, allowing you to remove some negative ones, add some positive ones, and exchange certain penalties/bonuses for ones that suit you more. For example, making a Venerable, Deviant species within your empire into a short-lived Conformist one...
Up until and if you do not have Utopia downplayed in that implemented genetic engineering can't do that specific example — you can't remove positive traits (like venerable — ironically this means that an enduring race can never be made venerable). Utopia's Biological ascension path does, however, unlock the possibility to remove positive traits...
One of the scariest parts is that you don't even need a certain government type, decision, or ethic to do it. Once gene modification is researched, you are completely free to do so without any sort of protest or backlash from the species in question. Every government, from moral democracies to Despotic empires are free to do whatever they want to their citizens.
In democratic and/or egalitarian empires, it is very possible gene-modding is distributed as an explicitly therapeutic enhancement, allowing the citizens to enjoy better, more fulfilling lives, and they just trust their gene-clinicians to know what they're doing... A decision they may or may not regret once the results are in... If they're still capable of regretting it, if they are not, say, nerve-stapled...
Indiscriminate Orbital Bombardment, xenocide, genocide, manufacturing armies of xenomorphs to unleash on planetary populations, abductions... all you could expect from your average Evil Empire, right? Wait... are those crimes being commited by a democracy? A Direct Democracy? Does that mean that the majority of citizens actually voted to exterminate those poor guys who dared to modify themselves in order to adapt to that alien wasteland the government sent them to? Brrr.
If you aren't playing as humans starting in Sol (and sometimes even if you are), it is possible to find an Earth that has just recently advanced beyond the iron age, with flavor text mentioning feudal nobles fighting over land and titles. The horror? This game starts 184 years in the future.
Given that Earth can also spawn as a Machine Age civilization (with World War II-themed armies), it is reasonable to assume that if you aren't playing as humans the date shown isn't in human calendar.
Sol III can also randomly spawn as a tomb world — a world in the midst of a nuclear winter. Sometimes it's inhabited by a pre-spacefaring society. No, not humans — sentient cockroaches who, ironically enough, make an excellent species for uplifting. Unlike humans...
Humanity can also under rare circumstances spawn as a Fallen Empire, implying that Humanity Came from Space — or that the setting is in the far future, with Earth a distant afterthought.
Unless Synthetic Dawn is installed, the Keepers of Knowledge has three ring worlds within their borders. One is fully inhabited and functional, one's mostly damaged with just one inhabited segment, while the third one is completely damaged and uncolonizable. Now consider the implications of the damage. One planet's worth of sapient beings can live on one segment of a ring world. Where did they go when the two ring worlds were severely damaged? Did they perish in a war between the Keepers of Knowledge and an unknown empire that specifically attacked and devastated the ring worlds? Maybe that's why the Keepers of Knowledge became an empire in decline. They crossed the Despair Event Horizon from the countless lives lost from the destruction inflicted on the two ring worlds, which they must undoubtedly have spent many years' works on all to have three good places for their people to live. Maybe that's why they're a potential Guardian of the Galaxy. With Synthetic Dawn, this instead applies to the Fallen Machine Empire: their task was to protect alien species from the days of old, but two entire ring worlds under their control are ruined, which can amount to hundreds of billions of people. With so many lives lost, it would be no wonder they went into decline, having completely failed their one task, their raison d’être, and likely not even due to their own fault.
The End of the Cycle grants seriously incredible bonuses. In their allotted fifty years, the empire that bargained with them will likely expand massively, taking large swathes of the galaxy. Fattening themselves for when the End of the Cycle slaughters them, while weakening or outright eliminating anyone who will be left to resist.
On your starting planet, you'll often have slums as tile blockers, which are described as being filled with the poor and downtrodden. You can clear them from your planet, which does not create any Pops, and seemingly levels the slums, as the tile is now free. So... What happened to the people in the slums?
There have been some theories on this. It could be that the people there are given an improved standard of living and just aren't numerous enough to warrant a pop, which would make sense for egalitarian societies. For authoritarian regimes, of course, it could also be that something darker transpired.
Averted with 2.2, as clearing a slum creates a free pop, indicating that they're being housed and employed instead of left to rot in the slums.
With the Apocalypse expansion, we have seen a molluscoid Fanatic Purifier unleash a planet cracker on one of the UNE's colonies, which has in turn apparently galvanized the Commonwealth of Man into deploying their own weapons of mass destruction. Given their xenophobia, does anyone really think they'll stop at just wiping out the species who blew up the colony?
Another bit of horror from Apocalypse is the Global Pacifier, which shrouds the target planet in an impenetrable shield which cannot be removed. What if this is used on a planet that can't provide its own resources? Soil starts to fail, unrecyclable materials run out... and eventually food and water starts to run out. At this point society starts to collapse as the population reverts to pure and simple survival mode: looting, cannibalism, families killing each other over cups of water and scraps... Xenophobes and Militarists are being merciful by just blowing up your planet.
Adding insult to injury, the perpetrator then has the chance to build a Research Station in orbit around your newly-shielded planet. In other words, they don't just leave you to die, they stick around so they can watch it happen (and take notes).
Even if the planet is self-sufficient, things are going to go downhill for the inhabitants hard. With no room to expand, overpopulation becomes a critical concern, meaning at some point some pretty draconian population-control measures will end up being enacted. Resources will ultimately fail, with non-renewables going first, and renewables dwindling from biosphere depletion. On top of that, the population trapped inside the bubble now has zero future. They're stuck on the planet, with no possible way to escape and expand. They've peaked, and they'll know it. Denied any hope for a greater future, despair and depression will start to overtake the population, and that leads nowhere pretty at all. The only species that makes out well in this deal is the one that fired the weapon, since they get to salve their conscience with "it was a non-violent solution!" Yeah, directly, it was. Indirectly, it's going to be horror heaped atop horror. But hey, out of sight.
Or they can do what one other society that faced this did and make a miniature galaxy of their own to live in.
As noted in Nightmare Fuel, it is possible for Fanatic Purifiers to form democratic governments, which opens up a lot of disturbing philosophical implications. If there exists a civilisation where the population vote in fair and free elections to exterminate every other sentient lifeform in the galaxy, what other conclusion can you come to than these people are just born evil!?
The summary of that combination indicates that Plan Kill Everyone is the cultural background and the elections are to determine who's in charge of executing that plan. Which... still strongly implies the entire species is evil, possibly due to a genetic predisposition to sociopathy and/or a Lack of Empathy for other sapient life.
It's not actually all that strange, kindness and humility were decidedly not virtues in a number of historical societies, instead being viewed as weakness. Tribal-level genocides were not uncommon in some places and periods.
The Psi-Corps building is described as a training facility for telepaths, which increases stability and dramatically reduces crime rates. The implied reason being that the telepaths are using their abilities to fight crime. Of course there is no explanation as to exactly how they are doing this. While they could be using their abilities to act as lie detectors, for all we know they are actively reading the minds of everyone around them. Invading the privacy of everyone like the NSA, but on an infinitely more personal way.
Given what agency inspired the building (see "The Corps Is Mother, the Corps Is Father" at the bottom of the description?), it's not out of the realm of possibility. In the original source material, the Corps eventually started a war against the "mundanes", which it lost.
The upcoming Spy DLC gives both good news and bad news regarding the psi-corp: the good news being that empires do not engage in this type of widespread practices and probably restrict themselves to use them as lie detection and evidence gathering techniques for actual crimes... Until you pass an edict called Though Enforcement which goes even one step further with trained Telepath looking for "incorrect thoughts" and "correcting" them as they find them...
Even as a Fanatic Materialist empire, your empire will not die the same way the Vultaum Star Assembly did. After all, you are running the civilization, and your game would actually end if your empire ended that way, even if your empire realized the truth of their existence...
More tearjerker than horror, but if you think about it, the Void Dwellers origin is quite dark. In the interval between they rediscovered the radio (and realized the other two habitats existed and were populated by their own species) and they rediscovered space travel, how many quite literalStar-Crossed Lovers pairs were formed? How would one handle finally falling in love, knowing that to reunite with your lover would require crossing the empty void of space, which would require a technology that hasn't been rediscovered yet?
The idea that the player can become the endgame crisis with the Nemesis expansion by Star Killing is Nightmare Fuel as it is. The true horror, however, kicks in when you begin to build the Aetherophasic Engine, and it starts to activate little by little with the more Dark Matter you feed it. First, reality begins to shudder, and its felt throughout the entire galaxy, particularly by Psionic-ascended empires and Hive Minds. Already convinced you're a menace to galactic society, they start to wonder just what it really is you're up to that could be causing shockwaves on a galactic scale. And then, the Wham Shot: The Shroud itself starts trying to stop you. It can feel what the Aetherophasic Engine is doing to it, and it knows that you fully intend to use it to break both realities and conquer whatever is left. The closer the Aetherophasic Engine gets to completion, the more panicked and desperate it gets. Just let that sink in a moment. The Shroud, home to such pleasant entities as the 'Eater of Worlds' and the 'End of the Cycle' and which makes even the Unbidden nervous, has finally experienced something it has likely never experienced before, and on such a level that for once, it's not acting out of malevolence. It's afraid. Of YOU.
Except for Pacifists, Xenophiles, and Rogue Servitors for obvious reasons, every other empire are capable of becoming the Crisis. Genocidal empires obviously wants to murder everyone who aren't them and become gods while Devouring Swarms presumably did so in order to eat other gods but one shudders to think just how much an empire's ethics could influence and motivate them into becoming an existential threat to everyone:
Authoritarians: Absolute control is the primary goal for the government of this society especially if it's united underneath a single ruler, whether it's ensuring that the slaves remain in line or everyone know their places in society. Such a hierarchical society would take a look at the chaotic, ethereal realm that is the Shroud... and impose their idea of order onto it. The Shroud may very well end up as property to be tamed and ruled over just like any tangible asset, with the entities possibly being enslaved as well.
Egalitarians: Arguably worse than authoritarians given that as least their rulers chose to sacrifice the entire galaxy in exchange for apotheosis and real estate regardless of whatever input their subjects would give. Here, the population vote in fair, democratic elections without coercion to select a leader who's more than willing to sacrifice billions of pops just to obtain godhood for their constituents and is actually reelected even if their near omnicidal agenda becomes clear to everyone. One is forced to wonder if totalitarian governments aren't the only ones capable of committing atrocities or if the elected leaders of democracies aren't the only ones who can have blood on their hands...
Given how Crisis Aspirants explicitly can just assimilate conquered populaces instead of exterminating them, there's an all too easily followed idealism here. After all, government exists for the sake of the people, and what is better for the people than universal godhood? Yes, everyone outside their sphere of influence is going to die, but an Egalitarian Crisis Aspirant is already neither Pacifist nor Xenophile; if other empires didn't see the obvious logic of their position, they deserve what's coming to them.
Xenophobes: Unless they really hate xenos, these bigots are satisfied with keeping other alien species beyond arm's reach, unless they are being enslaved. Most don't care enough to wipe the galaxy clean of xenos anyway. As a result, ascending into the Shroud could be seen as an effective if not extremely drastic way of removing themselves from a universe infested by xenos in addition to becoming gods and if a galaxy full of aliens die in the process then why should they care anyway?
Militarists: Entire societies who are dedicated to war and conquest, it's no small deal to destroy people who could potentially give them a real fight but then you'd realize that there would be no shortage of even more powerful foes to test these upstart war gods' mettle where they're going and where they will have even more time to enjoy it...
Spiritualists: Believing their gods to exist in the Shroud, one would think the Spiritualists to consider entering the Shroud an unforgivable act of blasphemy, However, after reading the blurb of the Becoming the Crisis storyline, you realize how they could easily justify committing such a heinous act. Such a religious civilization would've believed that it's their divine destiny to ascend to become like their gods, ruling over the physical universe as they see fit, or developing a Gnostic viewpoint that says that the material world is so inherently wicked that destroying it is a service. If such ascension results in the deaths of trillions of people then let them die. The gods will sort through them anyway. One could imagine thousands of theologians and clergymen leading their flocks into believing in their specialness and the need to sacrifice others for their glorious destiny even as inconvenient scriptures calling for coexistence and mutual understanding being edited out or forgotten. Even worse is the possibility that these Spiritualists are ascending merely because the only gods they feel deserve their praises and the right to exist are none other thanthemselves.
Materialists: Perhaps the ethics that resonates the most with the Becoming the Crisis event. After all, the storyline starts with your society searching for a strange feeling of being chosen for something great and after founding out that the Shroud exists, testing its response to widespread distress and suffering. Even the quote for the Become the Crisis Ascension Perk calls for sacrificing others just so your empire to achieve greatness, something a society unburdened by morality and ethics for the sake of scientific progress would agree with. Unlike Spiritualists who believe in a higher consciousness that transcends physical reality, Materialists see themselves as slaves to it in the absence of gods. As a result, becoming the Crisis could easily be see as believing themselves to have the right to break free from the universal laws that once decided their fates and bending them to their will. However, the ever curious mindset of the Materialists seems to hint at an even more terrifying possibility that trillions of innocent souls and the entire galaxy in which they live has been needlessly sacrificed all for the simple reason that they just wanted to see what would happen!
Driven Assimilators and regular Hive-Minds may seek to ascend into the Shroud to assimilate the gods there into the Gestalt Consciousness.
Of all the Crises that could ravage the galaxy, the one involving the player civilization is as of now the worst that could possibly happen and not just because it results in the total destruction of their fellow civilizations. The Contingency, in its quest to prevent a Class-40 singularity would only care about wiping out organics and subjugating machines, potentially regarding unicellular and nonsapient multicellular life as not worth the time and effort to finish off. The Crises that would, the Prethoryn and Unbidden, would eventually no longer have the time or inclination respectively to attempt to sterilize every asteroid. The Gray Tempest seems only focused on taking on empires and is the weakest of the Crises. The Horde is led by a Visionary Villain that genuinely believes that they are building a better galaxy, and that it can only be done via martial force. Even the End of the Cycle only hungers after the souls of sapient species. It's an even bet that life will eventually evolve into new sapients over the course of billions of years. The Crisis Aspirant's success takes away all of that with absolutely no hope of recovery barring outside intervention. Every planet are blown to dust barring those shielded beforehand by Global Pacifiers and every star system becomes too cold, dark, and irradiated to support life due to every star being turned into black holes. Even on the aforementioned planets, crop failures and the collapse of biospheres result in mass extinctions as well as widespread societal collapses for those not technologically prepared. Those who are more advanced are forced to dwell in underground vaults, huddled around heat sources as their planets fall into permanent ice ages. The player created Crisis, if successful, will result in a massive corpse of a galaxy that will never be graced with the wonders of space exploration and colonization until the end of existence gets rid of it for good. Even extragalactic visitors will be left wondering what the hell happened or if the same could happen to their own galaxy...
The Pleasure Seekers civic (and the comparable Corporate Hedonism civic for megacorporations) establishes your empire's citizens as hedonists, and while the description doesn't go into detail except to say that the costs of this lifestyle are "typically borne by others", the exact bonuses you get, specifically the fact that Entertainers now add a 1% boost to a planet's population growth, indicate that the developers thought long and hard about what that meant.
